Phase and magnitude spatiotemporal dynamics of β oscillation in electrocorticography (ECoG) in the monkey motor cortex at the onset of 3D reaching movements

β oscillations in local field potentials, electro-corticography (ECoG), and electroencephalograms (EEG) are ubiquitous in the motor cortex of monkeys and humans. However due to their lack of contributions, compared to other frequency ranges, to decode effector kinematics especially in ECoG signals, spatiotemporal dynamics of ECoG β oscillations has not been examined despite the larger areas that ECoG arrays can cover than standard intracortical multielectrode arrays. Here, we used ECoG grids to cover large areas of motor cortex and some somatosensory cortex in monkeys while they performed an unconstrained reaching and a lever pulling task at two force levels in three dimensional space. We showed that under the pulling task β power increased around movement onset. However, the β phases were locked around the movement onsets and their peak timings were spatially aligned in the motor cortex. These results may indicate that spatiotemporal dynamics of β oscillation conveys task relevant information and that ECoG arrays will be useful to study larger spatiotemporal patterns in the motor cortex, or any cortical areas in general, than intracortical multielectrode arrays.